FOX (AS. fox, OHG. fuhs, Ger. Fuchs, fox,
Goth, fauhō, vixen; possibly connected ultimately
with Skt. puccha, tail). A member of a group
or ‘alopecoid series’ of canine animals, more
easily distinguished from the wolves, dogs, or
jackals of the same family (Canidæ) by outward
appearance than by zoölogical differences. They
are, in general, of smaller size and less
proportionate height; have longer hair, usually more
reddish or yellowish than gray; larger, more
triangular and furry ears; a more slender pointed
muzzle, with straighter jaws; and a longer and
more bushy tail, than their allies. Some
zoölogists refuse to separate them even as a genus, but
most students place them in the genus Vulpes,
and still further separate the American gray fox
as Urocyon, and the little African long-eared
foxes as Fennecus. The anatomical characters
upon which Vulpes is distinctly based are
principally found in the skull, where “the bony
projection forming the hinder border of the socket
of the eye is regularly curved downward and
has a convex upper surface” in the wolves and
jackals; “whereas in the fox the same process is
hollow above, and has a more or less marked
tendency to curve upward behind”; also, the
air-chambers in the frontal bones of the wolves are
absent in the foxes. Another constant distinction
is found in the pupil of the eye, which, when
contracted, is round in the dog-like canines and
elliptical in the foxes. The true foxes (apart
from the African fennecs) are scattered throughout
all the northerly regions of the world, from
the edge of the tropical zone to the highest
Arctic lands, but none are known in the Southern
Hemisphere. The number of species is
indeterminate, conservative naturalists regarding as
local varieties various forms to which others give
specific names.

All inhabit holes in the earth, usually of
their own digging, but do not hibernate, are
nocturnal, and subsist mainly upon animal prey
which they capture by stealthy approach and a
quick rush; and all utter yelping cries, and breed
annually. They are believed not to have
contributed in any appreciable degree to the ancestry
of any race of domesticated dogs, and
although everywhere highly intelligent in their
field of thought, are rarely tamed as pets or
trained to perform tricks well. The typical and
best-known species is the European red fox
(Vulpes vulgaris), the hero of British fox-hunting
(see Fox-Hunting) , and the renard or
Reinecke Fuchs of European folk-lore. (See
Colored Plate of Canidæ.) It is spread over the
whole of Europe and Asia, and is also found
in Asia Minor and along the south shore of the
Mediterranean. The ordinary type, familiar in
Great Britain and western Europe, is reddish
brown above and white below, with the outer
portions of the ears and feet black, and the tip
of the ‘brush,’ or tail, white. Its length may
vary from 27 to 46 inches, exclusive of the tail,
which is itself from 12 to 15 inches long. Colors
and markings vary greatly, however, as well as
size and proportions. The habits of the common
fox in England are thus sketched by Lydekker
and Bell, and the essential facts apply to the
animal in all parts of its range:

“Although the fox is by no means averse to
taking possession of the deserted burrow of a
rabbit or a badger, it generally excavates its own
‘earth,’ in which it spends a considerable portion
of its time. As all hunters know, foxes
frequently
prefer to live out in the woods, those with a
northern aspect being, it is said, generally
avoided. Sometimes these animals will prefer a
thick hedgerow or a dry ditch, while we have
known them to select the tall tussocks of coarse
grass in swampy meadows as a resting-place;
and they have also been found in straw-ricks,
where it is on record that in one instance cubs
have been born. The breeding time is in April,
and the usual number of young in a litter is from
four to six. The prey of the fox consists, writes
Bell, ‘of hares, rabbits, various kinds of ground
birds, particularly partridges, of which it
destroys great numbers; and it often makes its
way into the farmyard, committing sad havoc
among the poultry. It has been known not
infrequently to carry off a young lamb. When
other food fails, the fox will, however, have
recourse to rats and mice, and even to frogs and
worms; while on occasion beetles are largely
consumed, and on the seashore fish, crabs, and
mollusks form a part of its diet. Carrion seems
never to come amiss, while the old story of the
fox and the grapes alludes to the fruit-eating
propensities of these animals.’ The usual cry of
the fox is a yelping bark. The well-known scent
of the fox is secreted by a gland situated
beneath the tail. The cunning exhibited by
English foxes in escaping from hounds has been
so often described that we shall make no further
allusion to it here, beyond saying that it has
probably attained its present development as the
result of the inherited experience of many
generations. The life of the fox is a precarious one;
the huntsman is his friend and the gamekeeper
his foe; and were he not specially protected for
the sport he gives to hounds and men, he would,
like the wolf, have long since been extinct in
England. That the fox is an ancient inhabitant
of the British Islands is proved by the occurrence
of its fossilized remains in caverns in
company with those of the mammoth and other
extinct animals. This, however, is not all, for a
skull . . . has been dug up from the sands
lying at the top of the Red Crag of Suffolk,
which are vastly older than the mammoth
period.”

As the Old World fox is traced eastward
distinct local varieties are encountered, which,
however, intergrade. Thus a black-bellied fox is
characteristic of southern Europe, and is
decidedly different from the ordinary colors of the
North African variety. The dry plains of western
Asia support a paler form, and this is
succeeded eastward by two much larger types of the
eastern and western Himalayas, which, in winter,
when the coat is long and the colors are heightened,
are extremely handsome: a characteristic
marking among these is a dark stripe athwart
the shoulders. Siberia, China, and Japan
likewise have varieties of this same one species,
which, if the American red fox be also included,
ranges throughout almost the entire Northern
Hemisphere, and has the most extensive distribution
of any of the Canidæ. Asia possesses some
other very distinct species of foxes, nevertheless,
of which the most familiar is the small, alert, and
pretty Indian fox (Vulpes Bengalensis) to be
met with all over Hindustan, except in thickly
forested regions. It is rarely hunted by scent,
with foxhounds; but frequently affords good
sport by coursing with greyhounds. Three other
species of ‘desert’ foxes, all pale and yellowish
in hue, belong to the open sandy plains and table-lands
between Arabia and Afghanistan. One of
these is the widely spread desert fox (Vulpesleucopus); another, the better-known corsac
(q.v.), and the other varieties inhabit Thibet and
Afghanistan. The earliest fossil remains of
distinctly canine beasts are fox-like animals of the
Middle Tertiary period.

American Foxes. Several species of fox are
characteristic of North America. The most
widespread and conspicuous is the red fox, called by
American zoölogists a distinct species (VulpesPennsylvanica), but regarded by European
students as a local phase of the circumpolar
‘common’ fox, heretofore described. It is hard to
distinguish it in the normal type from the European
fox, though the colors are, on the average,
rather brighter; and it varies on our continent
quite as diversely as does the fox of the Old
World. The normal red fox remains common in
spite of the civilization of the country throughout
the eastern United States and Canada, westward
to the Plains, as far south as northern
Georgia; and reappears west of the Rocky
Mountains and thence to the Pacific Coast in a paler
large-tailed form. In the far north occur more
rarely two other varieties — the cross fox and the
silver fox. The former is simply a more or less
normal red fox, marked sometimes strongly,
sometimes indefinitely, with a dark cross on the back
and shoulders, fine specimens of which are given
a superior value by traders in peltries. The
latter, or silver fox (var. argentata), is much
rarer, and is black, with a silvered or hoary
appearance due to many of the hairs being tipped
with white; the tail is black with a white tip,
and the soles of the feet are hairy, fitting it for
life amid ice and snow. Good pelts of the silver
fox are extremely valuable. That both these are
merely phases of the red fox is plain from the
fact that they may be born in the same litter
with normally red cubs. Foxes totally black also
occur frequently in the Hudson Bay region. The
American red fox had originally much the same
habits as those of the European animal, seems
to be deserving of quite as much credit for
sagacity and acuteness, and has learned to
accommodate itself as well to the exigencies
brought by civilization and the chase. The writings
of American naturalists and sportsmen
abound in interesting stories of its alertness,
ingenuity, and adaptiveness, and show that it
has spread and survived in the United States,
where the gray fox has diminished.

A small grayer species of the southern
California coast (Vulpes macrotis) is conspicuously
distinguished by its great ears.

The Kit, Swift, or Burrowing Fox (Vulpesvelox) is a well-marked species of the dry plains
of the United States, whose range extends from
Colorado and Nebraska north to the Saskatchewan
Valley. It is small, only about 20 inches
long, slender and compact in form. Its color
is yellowish-gray on the upper surfaces, fading
through reddish to white on the belly and legs,
and there is a black patch on each side of the
muzzle. The ears are short and densely furred,
and the soles of the feet are overgrown with long
woolly hair, like those of the Arctic fox. It digs
burrows with skill and speed, feeds upon small
rodents, insects, small birds and their eggs, etc.,
and is remarkably swift of foot and dexterous
in hiding. Its fur becomes thick in winter and
pale gray in color, rendering it nearly invisible.
See Plate of Foxes And Jackals.

The Blue or Arctic Fox (Vulpes lagopus) is
one of the most interesting of all the species. It
is known all around the Arctic shores, and in
summer is a variable brown (even sooty in some
cases) on the upper parts, and yellowish-white
on the ventral surfaces, throat, etc.; the under
fur, however, is everywhere dull blue. This
bluish tint frequently appears in the summer dress
in patches in the foxes of all regions; but in
those of the Aleutian Islands and southeastern
Alaska it characterizes the whole pelage, and
gives the name ‘blue’ fox to the animal in that
region. E. W. Nelson, who describes it at
length in his Natural History of Alaska
(Washington, 1887), concludes that this is the typical,
original form, from which the brownish and
blackish foxes elsewhere are variants. The blue
foxes remain of that color all winter, putting
on a longer, thicker coat as cold weather
approaches; but elsewhere all the Arctic foxes
become purely white about October, and remain so
until spring, rendering them almost invisible
upon the snow and aiding them to steal upon
their prey. They are animals of the open
country and seacoast, and in winter they often visit
the Eskimo villages or come close to their camps,
and are easily trapped. “Parts of the country,”
says Nelson, speaking of Alaska, “where rocky
ledges occur, are especially frequented by them,
as the crevices among the rooks give them
welcome shelter. During summer they fare sumptuously
upon the breeding waterfowl, eggs, and
young birds, which are found everywhere, but
in winter comes harder work, and the ground
is carefully searched for stray mice, lemmings, or
an occasional ptarmigan. In early spring, toward
the end of March, when the seals begin to haul
up on the ice and the first young are born,
thousands of these foxes go out seaward and live upon
the ice the rest of the season. The young seal's
offal, left by hunters and from other sources,
gives them more food there than the shore affords
at this time.” It may be added to this that
Feilden, who was with the Polar expedition of
Nares, A Voyage to the Polar Sea (London,
1878), found that in Grinnell Land these foxes
subsisted in winter largely upon stores of frozen
lemmings, etc., which they had hidden in crevices
of rocks or had buried in the ground. The fur
of this fox is very valuable, and most of all that
of blue foxes of the Aleutians, where they are
now to a certain extent protected, not only, but
where they have been colonized upon certain
islands, and are being bred and provided with food
as a regular fur-raising industry. See Alaska;
and Colored Plate of Canidæ.

The Gray Fox is a species (Urocyon argenteus)
of the United States, which is generally
separated from other foxes by cranial
peculiarities, and by the fact that the tail has a
concealed mane of stiff hairs. The general coat
is silver-gray above and whitish on the under
parts, but the chin and a patch on the nose are
black, and the base of ears, patch at side of neck,
collar on throat, interior surface of fore legs, and
a broad band along the belly are cinnamon rufous.
The size is about the same as that of the rod fox,
but the hair is stiffer and less admirable as a
pelt. This species is generally distributed over
the United States, but in the West differs
locally so much from the Eastern type that no less
than five subspecies have been named. It is
accustomed to life in the forests rather than in
open country, and has unusual ability in
tree-climbing; but it seems to be less adaptive than
the red fox, and has almost disappeared from the
thickly settled and much-cleared Northern and
Eastern States. See Plate of Foxes And Jackals.